“I beg your pardon. You were saying?”
“I propose another two percent cut of the profits, on top of the two percent you’ll get when we use the shed for storage. That’s two percent for keeping mum about my name and two percent for the use of the shed. Tom Holder told me you’re on board regarding the latter.”
She’s shaking her head. Taking a deep breath, tasting the sea air, she says, “I don’t want another two percent cut.”
“You drive a hard bargain. Three percent, then, for your silence and two for the shed. That could add up to as much as twenty-five pounds for a single run.”
“I don’t want money. I want something that will cost you far less.”
He leans forward, his elbows on his knees, curiosity alive in his face. “Do you? And what would that be?”
“I want you to take me with you when you next go to sea.” This is what she wants, what sheneeds—to go where George used to, and her father. To satisfy, at last, the unwieldy yearning she feels for a place so far from shore the horizon all around is made of ocean.
For perhaps ten seconds he merely continues to look at her, the corner of his bottom lip caught between his teeth. And for that short moment she believes he’s going to say yes. The intrigue in his face, the—dare she think it?—fondness. Hunger, too. Then he shakes his head and says, “No.”
“No?” she echoes, stupidly.
“Under no circumstances will I do such a thing.” His fingers dance on his knee. “Preposterous notion.”
She flinches as if slapped. “But, Jack—”
“Do you have any idea how dangerous it is? How many ships are lost each year, gone down in storms or run aground where it shoals? That’s nothing to say of the risk of an engagement with a ship of the Revenue Service.” He jumps up and begins to pace the room. “I can’t believe you would ask it of me, Isabel!”
Something in her bristles. “You do it! You go to sea all the time! George and my father used to. Why shouldn’t I? What makes youthink I’m made of such weak stuff I couldn’t withstand the danger the same as you?”
He stops and turns back to her. “As if any man would want to have the death of a woman at sea on his conscience. Or anywhere.”
He sounds so bitter she shrinks deeper into the armchair. “What of women who go abroad, to America, to India?” she says. “Do they not board a ship?”
“Those sorts of voyages can’t be avoided. You’re mad if you think I’ll take you on a smuggling run to France.” Seeing her expression, he sits down again and says, more calmly, “I say this for your own sake. Why should you wish to go to sea, anyway?”
Looking down at her hands, clasped tightly around the coffee glass in her lap, she says, “Why do you do it?”
“To trade. Evidently.”
Her glass has a smudge on it where her lips have touched it. She wipes it away. “I’m sure that’s not the only reason.”
“It’s different for me. You’re a woman. Why would you want to go sailing?”
Glancing up at him, she says softly, “Maybe it’s because I’m the Sea Bucca’s daughter.” She doesn’t mean it, of course. She’s only trying to lighten the mood. Or is she? Listening to the distant crash of the waves, the desire is so strong, so undeniable, she must press ahead. She must make him see reason—at all cost.
“The sea is calling you, you mean,” Jack says, and there’s a tinge of a smile now, chasing away the bitterness. “Like a siren calls a mariner.”
She thinks of the first time she swam in the river; of the voice she heard in the shrieks of the gulls and the rustle of the breeze. “That’s what it feels like.” She says it very seriously and he smiles and says, “But if the sea is a dangerous mistress, can you imagine what sort of parent she makes?”
The playfulness of his words emboldens her. She says, “It would only be the one time. Please, Jack. I’ve always wanted to go to sea.”
He taps his coffee glass. “This may come as a surprise to you, but I care not what you want.”
Her hands squeeze together in her lap. She hates herself for what she’s about to say. The thought of Lieutenant Sowerby alone makes her cower under the weight of her guilt—just for saying it, for implying she would betray him. She would never do it. Still, Jack has got to believe she just may. It’s the only way she can make him agree. She says, “It’s in your interest to care what I want, if you wish to prevent me speaking to the Revenue Service.”
Silence, apart from the waves. Then Jack says measuredly, “You’ll want to tread carefully, Isabel. There are other means by which I might prevent that.”
She thinks of the pistol in his hand when he lay wounded in her bed, at how quickly he woke and aimed it at the door at the slightest sound. For the first time, she thinks of him as a dangerous man. She hates this, too. Swallowing down something thick, she says, “You wouldn’t.”
He holds her gaze. Her heart runs, jumps. The carriage clock on the chimneypiece ticks away half a minute, then another. “No,” he says at last. “I would not.”
She takes a shuddering breath. “So you’ll take me with you?”
